The current exhibition at the Dixon’s Mallory and Wurtzburger
Galleries, titled simply “Beth Edwards,” is the most complete gathering
to date of Edwards’ emotionally complex portraits of the
mid-20th-century American dream of owning shiny new convertibles and
ranch-style homes furnished with Danish modern divans, potted plants,
and modern artworks, or, if original work was out of the question, good
reproductions.
Instead of human models, Edwards uses vintage rubber toys as
stand-ins for the proud homeowners. In Happy Day, an
anthropomorphic mouse with a frozen smile and huge lidless eyes stands
proudly in his spic and span living room. The shape of his moist black
nose is repeated in the fractured face of Picasso’s portrait of his
mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter. In Good Morning,
another happy homeowner — in this case, a beautiful, young golden
retriever — is backdropped by a royal-blue divan and Philip
Guston’s painting of a huge pile of worn-out footwear (horses and
humans), an allusion perhaps to the labor required to build beautiful
homes for the well-heeled.
Pinkney Herbert’s Delta Series L
The glossy surfaces, controversial masterworks (that elicited
outrage when they were first unveiled), and the frozen-faced dolls that
populate Edwards’ “happy paintings” suggest the search for happiness is
a slippery slope layered with complex feelings that can exhilarate or
undo us.
Like Edward Hopper, Edwards handles color with such mastery that her
artwork achieves a kind of transcendence. The iridescent-green baby
doll in Annunciation looks out a window at a blue sky feathered
with clouds. The figure’s chubby cheeks and huge brow are framed inside
a Hopperesque square of lavender light.
Ultimately, Edwards’ art is about the power of light to consume all
color and form, to absorb all paradox and pain into visions of
paradise. Edwards understands Hopper’s desire to do nothing but paint
light on the side of a house.
Through September 6th
Pinkney Herbert’s Jig
In David Lusk Gallery’s current show, “Floating World,” Pinkney
Herbert’s paintings no longer blast our point of view across
30-square-foot surfaces. Neither are they as spare as the paintings in
Herbert’s 2007 exhibition, a show in which softly curving lines,
wide-open spaces, and the quiet authority of works like Wing
seem inspired as much by Zen Buddhism as 20th-century
abstraction.
Instead, Herbert’s “Floating World” works are by turns fluid,
syncopated, celebratory. Their open and buoyant compositions, inspired
in part by the elegant woodblock prints of Japan’s Edo period
(1603-1868), invite us to take our time, to explore their textures,
colors, and shapes, and to realize that, though they are more subdued
than Herbert’s explosive earlier work, these paintings are as evocative
and original as any in his long and varied career.
Beth Edwards’ Annunciation
In “Floating World,” we feel the rhythms of New York as well as
Memphis, the two cities where Herbert lives and paints. Deep-red spiked
flowers surrounded by scumbled umber at the heart of Herbert’s pastel
on paper Delta Series L look as rich as Mississippi bottomlands,
as fertile as the Southern soul. In Buoy, a figure eight
accented with red-and-yellow lozenges wafts on air currents that twist
in unexpected directions like New York City’s improvisational jazz.
A cartoon-like hand with triple-jointed fingers and attenuated wrist
lies at the center of the nearly 6-foot-tall painting Jig. We
can almost hear the sound of one hand clapping in this crisp-edged,
bright-orange shape backdropped by a wash of pure yellow.
Two years after his last show, Herbert returns to David Lusk with
his sense of humor intact, with a new zest for life, with a mindset
similar to what 17th-century Japanese novelist Asi Ryoi described in
Tales of the Floating World as “refusing to be disheartened,”
turning one’s attention to the pleasures of the beautiful, impermanent
world.
